Renting, buying, or rent-to-own?

There are three ways to get a washer and dryer into a home you are living in: buy a set, take a rent-to-own agreement, or rent month to month. They suit different situations, and the cheapest one depends almost entirely on how long you will be there.

Buying

A new full-size pair generally runs from around nine hundred dollars upward before delivery, and a reconditioned pair less. You own it outright, nobody bills you monthly, and after a couple of years it is the cheapest option on paper.

What people underestimate is everything attached to ownership. A failed pump, control board or heating element is your bill and your weekend. Moving the pair means hiring help or borrowing a truck and a dolly, and a washer that has been laid on its side does not always survive the trip. If you are in a rental home, you may also be buying appliances for a laundry area whose next occupant has different hookups entirely.

Rent-to-own

Rent-to-own agreements spread payments over a fixed term and transfer ownership at the end. The monthly figure usually looks reasonable in isolation. The number that matters is the one the advertising rarely leads with.

Multiply the payment by the number of payments. If an agreement is quoted weekly, multiply by the full number of weeks, not by four. The total over a full term commonly lands well above what the same machines cost new at a retailer, because the agreement is financing as much as it is rental. That is not hidden, but it is rarely the number on the sign.

Rent-to-own makes sense if you want to end up owning the machines and cannot or would rather not pay for them at once. It is an expensive way to rent if what you actually wanted was the use of a washer for a year.

Renting month to month

Renting is the use of the machines without the ownership. With us that is $139 to start — $39 for your first month plus a $100 refundable deposit — and then $69 a month for a washer and dryer, or $45 for a single machine. Delivery and first-floor installation are included.

The part that carries the most value is what happens when something fails. If a machine stops working, we bring a working one and take the other away at no charge, for as long as you rent. There is no repair bill, no warranty period that expires, and no weekend spent getting a dead appliance up a basement staircase. When you are done, we collect the machines and return the deposit.

Working out which is cheapest for you

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope, and it turns on a single question: how many months?

Take the purchase price of a set you would actually buy and divide it by our monthly rate. At roughly a thousand dollars for a decent pair and $69 a month, that is about fifteen months. Stay longer than that in one place, keep the machines working, and buying wins on cash. Stay less — a one-year lease, a job that moves you, a house you are between — and renting is both cheaper and considerably less trouble.

Two things bend that comparison. A single significant repair on a machine you own closes much of the gap, and repairs on modern machines are not cheap. And resale recovers some of a purchase, but a used pair sells for a fraction of what it cost, and you still have to move it.

When each one is the right answer

Buy if you own the home, plan to be there for years, and are comfortable handling a repair when it comes.

Rent-to-own if ownership is the goal and paying at once is not possible — provided you have multiplied out the full term and are happy with that total.

Rent month to month if you are on a lease, between homes, in a unit whose hookups you will not keep, furnishing a property for tenants, or simply would rather a broken machine be somebody else's problem.

We rent because it suits a particular situation well, not because it suits everybody. If you are settled in a house you own and a used pair on Marketplace will do the job, that is genuinely the cheaper path and we would rather say so.